[OWW-Discuss] Weekend diversion: twitter in mediawiki/OWW

[Bill F]

I wrote an extension to display a user's twitter stream inside of an OWW
page via a parser tag, "<ShowTwitter>".

You can see it here:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Bill_Flanagan

This is the tag that allows it to work:

<ShowTwitter>wjf42</ShowTwitter>

The extension uses a script written by Remy Sharp (
http://remysharp.com/2007/05/18/add-twitter-to-your-blog-step-by-step/).
It's outrageous.

I've not enabled setting all of the variables yet. I added this just so I
can keep OWW members abreast of what I'm doing, most specifically if it
relates to OWW. I may extend this to update a Wiki page as a log file to
keep a long-term history within OWW. I can always retrieve this from Twitter
via their API. Making it searchable within OWW may be useful.

If there are server problems, it's yet another trivial way to keep on top of
what we're doing to fix it. I already reserved OpenWetWare as another
twitter name to make it more official if we ever choose to go there.

If anyone has suggestions how to make this more useful, let me know.

To set twitter status, there are a lot of different tools. Since I use the
Linux shell as much as I do, I have a pretty simple script to send out my
current status from the command prompt. We can update this status via php
calls as part of using OWW as well. I'm not doing this now but I may some
night when I have some time.

Twitter is free. We can create as many names as needed. If you have buddies
(friends, tweets, whatever), their status displays along with yours. This
has some interesting possibilities for loosely coordinating teams using OWW.
Like labs or IGEM teams? Writing projects? Lab exercises?

Thanks.
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